Postcards of the past

Travel back in time to a simpler era “Along Virginia’s Route 15” — a new postcard history book by Josie Ballato featuring downtown Culpeper on its cover.

Put out by South Carolina-based Arcadia Publishing, the 128-page pictorial features more than 200 postcards — many of them 100 years old or older — of everyday life along U.S. 15.

“To me, big history and the big events are nice, but it’s the stuff about how people lived, how they got around — the railroads and the roads — that I find really interesting,” said Ballato, who grew up in Culpeper, and today resides in Falls Church. “The social history of an area.”

Her easy-to-read book is both informative and engaging, depicting Loudoun, Fauquier, Culpeper and Orange counties.

Chapter 3, “Culpeper and Vicinity” includes postcard images like, a farmer plowing a field in Brandy Station, the old Culpeper Horse Show on today’s Bus. 29 and the former Culpeper Methodist Church on West Davis Street — one-half of the church still stands on the corner, next to Company 1’s fire station.

“Through the first half of the 20th century, Culpeper held annual horse races at the Culpeper Fairgrounds just outside the town limits. Monte Vista Park, as it was sometimes known, was located off Brandy Road east of downtown and patrons could take a special passenger train that shuttled between the town’s train depot and the fairgrounds. Crowds, some using umbrellas to ward off the July sun, cheer for their favorite steeds in the race underway in this postcard,” the author writes on page 82.

Ballato, a 1977 graduate of Culpeper County High School, pulled from her personal, extensive collection of old postcards in crafting the book, her first.

As for the accompanying text, she compiled it from various sources, including the Culpeper County Library, Eugene Scheel’s “Culpeper” and online records of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

But Ballato’s love of local history was born in Culpeper — her hometown and the hometown of her ancestors as early as the 1800s. She grew up hearing from her parents, “All history is local.”

“My mother had been in Culpeper all her life and used to talk a lot about what the town used to look like,” said Ballato of her late mother, Madge Ballato.

Her dad, a New Yorker who moved to Culpeper after World War II to marry Madge, worked at the local VDOT office for many years and liked to take the family on weekend drives.

“We would drive around a lot, down old country roads,” Ballato said. “You see so many interesting things that way. When I was a child growing up we did a lot of sightseeing at Civil War battlefields.”

Those country road trips, in part, inspired portions of the history included in “Along Virginia’s Route 15.” Ballato’s postcard collection, which she began amassing as a youngster, provided the pictures.

Many people collect postcards, she said, since the little messages are easy to store. Postcards really became popular around 1905 because of the railroad, Ballato said, at which time people began to really travel.

Early postcards, like the ones featured in her book, never included captions beyond a few words and so it was up to her to research and pen the text. More extensive captions on postcards didn’t start showing up until the 1950s, Ballato said.

For her, collecting postcards bridged generations.

“It was a way to connect with my mom and talk to her about the way things were,” Ballato said. “She spent all of her life in Culpeper so it was a way to reminisce.”

She got especially excited about the direction of “Along Virginia’s Route 15” when President Bush, earlier this year, established the route it traverses as a National Heritage Area. That means lots of significant American history happened here.

“I focused on the places that were maybe less well known,” said Ballato. “I’ve traveled up and down route 15 many times in my life. I focused on those areas.”

With the exception of a few sites in Loudoun, she visited or passed each of the places in the book. And as a student and lover of local history, Ballato, who works for the Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, gives back to her hometown.

She’s as an active supporter of Friends of Cedar Mountain, Civil War Preservation Trust, the Brandy Station Foundation and Culpeper County Library.

These days, she admitted, e-mail has replaced postcards, but that doesn’t mean nostalgic letters are a thing of the past.

Ballato hopes people will use the historic card collection in “Along Virginia’s Route 15” as a travel guide for local exploration: a back to the basics, if you will.

“You won’t find these postcards anywhere else,” she said, “because they are just of
regular places. It’s everyday life stuff, the stuff we forget about.”

Allison Brophy Champion can be reached at 825-0771 ext. 101 or

Want to buy it?“Along Virginia’s Route 15” goes on sale Monday for $21.99 through on-line booksellers or arcadiapublishing.com